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Piper is Ready to Disrupt the Home Security Market

Tranditional home security systems are expensive, complicated, ugly and come from companies that seem to be run by people that ironically you probably wouldn’t trust your house key with. Not to mention, it’s 2013 and you kinda want your home security system to work seamlessly with the internet and smartphones.

That’s all about to change thanks to Piper, a security device that launched just now actually, on IndieGoGo. Piper provides a simple device that connects over wifi and z-wave and packages a wide-angle camera, temperature, humidity, motion, and ambient light sensors, plus a speaker, microphone and even an alarm siren, into a compact and attractive unit that streams it’s data to the cloud and alerts your phone — and lets you connect to take a peek at the various data or video feeds at any time.

The team behind Piper, based in Ottawa, has been working on the product for over a year and in fact are further along than most crowd-funded hardware projects we’ve seen lately — they’ve finished with tooling and have already finished their first run of small batch manufacturing (pssst: if you’re listening, Hack Things will gladly put together an unboxing and full-on video review, so please consider sending us an eval unit :).

There’s no word — yet — on how open the data is (such as whether one would be able to create IFFT-like triggers and actions). The device itself runs Linux…perhaps we’ll see some jail-breaking and hacking with this one?

Overall, Piper looks like a very strong entrant into the field of home security 2.0, which we’ve seen heat up a bit lately (see Canary which has raised $1.5m and has 6 days to go in their campaign.) And since they’re way ahead on the manufacturing process, they say their first units will delivery starting this November. Early bird backers will get theirs for $189.00.

As for monthly fees? There will be no monthly fees for Indiegogo backers. The team says they are discussing an optional monthly service plan for future users who want to store larger amounts of video.

I for one am happy to see innovators like Piper coming to disrupt those awful old security systems companies. It can’t happen soon enough.